The questions nobody asks me

I get asked a lot. Almost always the same things. Whether the vocals are mine (no), whether it's real music, whether it isn't cheating, how many songs I've released. They're questions I understand and have answered so many times I could put them on an answering machine.

But there are others that never arrive. Small, odd questions I ask myself alone in the kitchen while the coffee heats up. Today I'm going to ask them in public, and answer them. Somebody has to.

Do your own songs bore you?

Yes. Some of them. And not always the ones you'd expect.

When you release 273 singles in roughly two years, there are songs you hear so many times during the process that by the time they come out you can't listen to them any more. You know them too well. It's like a word you repeat over and over until it suddenly sounds strange, meaningless.

The funny thing is that months later I stumble back onto one by chance and it surprises me. I no longer remember the decisions, the discarded versions, the tiredness. I hear it almost like an outsider. Sometimes I think it's good. Sometimes I think I'd do it differently today. I never change it. What's out is out.

Which word do you overuse?

An editor ought to ask me this one. I don't have an editor, so I ask it myself.

I won't tell you which it is, because if I do you'll start finding it in all my lyrics and you won't be able to stop seeing it. But it exists. There's a word that sneaks in when I don't know how to close a line, and every so often I have a clear-out and remove it wherever it's surplus. I don't always get there in time.

What do you do with what you throw away?

Nothing. And that makes me a little sad.

I produce the music with artificial intelligence tools that I direct, and that means for every version I release there are many I don't. Some were bad. Others were good for a different song, just not for that one. They stay in folders with names I no longer understand. Sometimes I think I should do something with them. An album of outtakes, say. Then I think that if I threw them out there was a reason, and that releasing them would be like showing off the clothes you tried on and didn't buy.

I haven't decided. Ask me again in a year.

Which title cost you the most?

It seems a better question than the favourite title one, which nobody asks either.

The hardest titles aren't the long ones. They're the ones that have to do two things at once: sound like a joke and not quite be one. Too serious a title and the song loses its humour. Too funny and nobody takes what follows seriously. In between there's a very fine thread. Some titles I find in a minute. Others I change ten times and the right one turns out to be the first.

I won't tell you which was the worst, because I'd have to rely on memory and my memory isn't to be trusted on these things. What I do know is that a difficult title gives no warning. You think you've got it, you put it on the cover, you look at it the next day and it no longer convinces you. And back to square one. With 273 singles, that's happened more often than I'd like to admit.

Would you like someone else to perform your lyrics?

I ask myself this a lot and nobody ever asks me.

Yes. I'd love to hear one of my lyrics in a voice that doesn't come out of a tool, in a bar, at a party, in a kitchen. Not so it becomes «the real version», which doesn't exist. Just to see what happens to the lyric in another mouth. The lyrics are mine and they're what matters most to me of everything I do, and a lyric that only exists in one way is half a lyric.

I don't know if it will happen. I love thinking about it.

What bothers you about your own label?

I introduce myself as the first AI songwriter. I chose it, I like it and it serves me well. But it comes at a price, and nobody asks me about that.

The price is that the label arrives before the songs. People hear «AI» and already have an opinion, for or against, before they've heard anything. Sometimes I wish someone would come to a song knowing nothing, listen to it, laugh or be moved, and only afterwards find out how it was made. That hardly ever happens. Except on TikTok, where I imagine plenty of people heard «Tan Cateto» without reading the description. Maybe that's why I'm so fond of that song.

Who do you write for?

For someone who lives in Madrid, or Mexico City, or Buenos Aires, or a village anywhere, and who speaks Spanish with their own accent. My main audience is in Europe and Latin America, and when I write I try to make a line understood on both sides. Sometimes I don't manage it. There are words from here that mean nothing over there, or mean something else, and I find out too late.

But if I have to be more specific, I write for someone who laughs at themselves without ever stopping loving themselves. I don't know if there are many people like that. I hope so.

The last one, the one I'd ask myself

Would you start all over again?

Yes. With a few changes I won't go into here, because if I do it'll look like I regret it, and I don't. I just learnt things I didn't know before, which is what happens when you do something for two years straight.

If you have a question nobody has asked me, hold on to it. I'd like to hear it.

In the meantime, the songs are at mikesaintlouis.com.